SeekerStar

by Blaze Ward

  Still, completely empty was strange. He was used to seeing a few people headed off on some errand.

  Empty as a graveyard.

  Daniel wished he could take his mental images somewhere else, but his impending death just kept reaching up a cold hand and poking him in the kidneys.

  The ishtan had chased Urid-Varg for however many thousand years, waiting until they could achieve their vengeance. Daniel had just killed the man first, and taken his place, as far as the snakes were concerned.

  His evil would not stand.

  He didn’t have a really good argument against that. Most of what he did qualified as evil on some level. Upgrading the Mbaysey to a new ship had been a good deed, and even then he had tweaked and smothered overreactions from the Trade Factor during the negotiations.

  Nothing bad, but keeping a lid on the usual explosions of personality. Drawing out contentment that this was a good enough deal and set him up for even greater things later when Kathra returned with other things to sell.

  Things completely unique.

  Daniel didn’t understand how the valence drives worked, other than you opened a hole in reality and flew through to someplace that would take light-decades to cover.

  At least two of the ships on the Turtle used something else. Not counting the turtle itself, which wasn’t a machine so much as a sea creatures flying in the depths of space instead.

  Onto the SkyCamel again. Everyone buckled in as Erin cleared the locks and backed them into the darkness.

  Because it was automatic, Daniel had ended up in front, next to the tall cyborg as she flew. He would have liked to turn his head to study her profile. The barcode tattoo. The mohawk needing to be trimmed a little. Even the mechanical leg that said more about how tough and amazing she was as a pilot, that she could do all this with just one leg.

  But he could not move. Not even his eyes more than enough to focus on things as they entered his field of vision.

  The Star Turtle.

  Bigger than a Septagon in length, but made of elegant, smooth lines, rather than the geometrically square edges of the great ships. He did not have the space for seventy decks, plus all the command towers, so he could never fit that many people inside, but he had forests and orchards. Alien bees like the masons he had enjoyed watching as a child in the garden, working their slow and careful way around the flowers as they filled up at the buffet.

  Everyone thought mason bees were useless, since they didn’t make enough excess honey to harvest, but Daniel understood the importance of working hard to help everyone, and that was what mason bees did. Pollinate. Provide beauty and food to the world.

  How did he get there?

  Ishtan. They had stirred up his memories in seeking his secrets. Old things were no longer buried under newer piles. He imagined that his nightmares would have been exquisite, to have so much new material to incorporate, but Daniel had no doubts that they would kill him when he was no longer useful.

  Open the vessel, a voice from the heavens commanded him.

  Daniel ignored it as just another nightmare made dayflesh.

  Open the vessel, it repeated.

  Daniel understood that the longest of the ishtan was addressing him. Commanding him.

  Could they not command the Turtle? What an interesting concept.

  He would not put it past that salaud, Urid-Varg, to have linked the command of the ship to something.

  The gem, of course.

  Only the bearer of the gem could issue orders. Urid-Varg never knew what his new horse would look like, so that was not enough. But imprinting the essence of the gem on the creature was, because that would always be how Urid-Varg was identified.

  Even after Daniel had killed the son of a diseased camel.

  He resisted. Tried to.

  Mental tentacles grabbed hold of his mind and squeezed. Pain centers lit with hideous fire.

  Daniel would have screamed, if it had been allowed.

  Open the vessel.

  He surrendered. Time had passed as he fought, but they had spent hundreds of lifetimes patiently hunting their prey. They would outlast even an opinionated chef.

  He reached out with his mind and told the nearest fin to admit them. Five other minds sat atop his as he did so, as he had once carried Kathra and the others when she executed Ugonna for that woman’s treachery. These were poised to stop him from doing anything else, such as telling the Turtle to annihilate the SkyCamel in a blast of whatever those eyes generated.

  Not that he hadn’t considered it. Erin and the others didn’t deserve such a death, but ending the ishtan would be doing the galaxy a favor, as near as he could tell. Especially if they decided to turn themselves into lesser versions of Urid-Varg.

  Such evil will never be tolerated! that voice boomed painfully in his mind. Never accepted.

  Daniel understood that he had no inner voice now. That someone was always in the room with him listening. Probably measuring out his burial shroud.

  Hopefully they were serious about their definition of evil, although he had no idea where they might go, if their home and species were both destroyed.

  Nobody offered an opinion, so presumably a worm like him didn’t merit such.

  In the distance, the fin of the Turtle split open like an oyster shell and lights came on.

  Forty-Four

  Damn it. A’Alhakoth wanted to snarl the word at the top of her lungs, but it wouldn’t do any good.

  She’d been so busy paying attention to her search for anything she could use as a weapon that she’d lost track of Erin and the others.

  At some point, they had emerged from the core and returned to the flight deck, while she’d been fixing herself a club.

  The feel of a SkyCamel launching was specific. The whole hull rang as the hatches cycled. The Spectres were all much quieter, but only because you climbed down a ladder and sealed yourself up before simply detaching and letting the bigger ship throw you across space.

  A’Alhakoth floated in the central core where the lifts all came together and cursed some more. All that, and she had failed. All the stalking slowly to get to the armory, only to discover it empty and stripped. Then to the machine shop, likewise empty, but she’d managed to detach a water pipe from a sink, so at least she had a club now.

  Not much time had passed while she was working, but it had been too much.

  They had done whatever it was they came to WinterStar for and then left.

  Hopefully, they hadn’t wired a bomb to blow the ship up in a few minutes. That might be a useful solution to her as a failure, but it wouldn’t do anything to help Erin.

  A’Alhakoth gripped a side bar and got her feet under her. If under had any meaning in zero gravity. She launched herself forward toward the navigating bridge.

  A booby trap in engineering would be invisible to her, as she’d never been in the engine room of a major vessel before. But they had flown here, and she didn’t think the pink aliens had been able to do that themselves, since they had needed Erin to fly the SkyCamel.

  The command deck on WinterStar was arranged by someone used to thinking in gravity, even though this vessel didn’t generate any. The deck was flat and square, when it could have just as easily been arranged all the way around the inner ring of the tube.

  A’Alhakoth supposed that whoever had built it normally designed things for bigger ships, or maybe large chunks of WinterStar had been salvaged from a vessel with grav field inducers.

  Five stations, all on a level plain as she entered almost sideways from her own relative down, like an aquatic mammal entering its dam. One woman sat perfectly still at the piloting station.

  She found it spooky that the pilot didn’t react at all to the sound of A’Alhakoth entering. Just sat there, staring ahead.

  A’Alhakoth caught a stanchion with her free hand and shifted slowly to her left, keeping the club in her hand ready if she needed it.

  Kamsichor Obiajunwa. That was the woman’s name. Older, as humans m
easured such things. Never a member of the comitatus, but good enough to sit watches on the bridge when Ife or Obioma weren’t around. She had geometric designs cut into the short buzz of her hair.

  She never moved.

  A’Alhakoth had wondered if there was another snake still on WinterStar, controlling whichever women were here, but they should have found her. Heard her moving around and done something about it, so she presumed that they had all left on the SkyCamel with Erin and Daniel.

  A’Alhakoth powered up one of the other stations, keeping an eye on Kamsichor, but the woman was oblivious to everything. The SkyCamel was making its way to the so-called Turtle.

  Kanus didn’t have such a creature in its biosphere, so she just had to guess what turtles apparently looked like, based on the monstrous thing floating off WinterStar’s bow. It certainly had the smooth streamlining of an aquatic creature. She presumed that the things sticking out at the corners and middle must be swimming limbs, with a head at the front and a tail at the rear.

  The size boggled her mind. She had heard stories of the Sept Empire’s enormous flagships, but Kanus barely built ships larger than WinterStar. And those used a grav field inducers similar to the human one, so a lot of the volume was power systems and equipment, with crew crammed in an uncomfortably tiny volume.

  Until she had met the Commander, A’Alhakoth had never imagined just living in space and letting spin generate the equivalent of gravity for you.

  She didn’t dare scan anything, lest she warn the aliens that they had missed someone and they decide to come back for her. And the Commander wasn’t here, so A’Alhakoth didn’t know if her best course of action to take would involve opening fire on the SkyCamel right now and killing her comrades, as the best chance to eliminate the pink aliens.

  Comitatus meant offering your life for Kathra Omezi and the others. Daniel seemed to be part of that group as well, as did the small woman Ndidi Zikora.

  Small. Compared to the rest, perhaps. Daniel’s height, so only half a head taller than A’Alhakoth, compared to the several heads taller of the Commander.

  There were no good choices. A’Alhakoth made a list of bad ones and cursed herself for failing Erin and the others. Perhaps, she should have just stayed on the SkyCamel, and planned to jump out and attack someone in flight. Or followed them to the bridge unarmed and tried to do something.

  Hadn’t Daniel used a fire suppressor to kill a god?

  She concentrated on breathing and studying the screen.

  The SkyCamel approached the Star Turtle and one of the swimming limbs split along the horizontal axis, revealing a sort of flight deck, unto which they landed, with the thing closing up again like a mouth.

  She decided to risk action at this point, hoping that whatever the aliens were doing over there would keep them too busy to watch WinterStar. She moved from her seat to hang in front of Kamsichor, more or less on her vertical.

  A’Alhakoth reached out a hand and poked the woman in the shoulder with the hand not ready to swing her pipe. Her feet kept her from bouncing backwards as she gripped the hanging bar.

  Kamsichor woke up. That was the only way A’Alhakoth could think of to describe the change in the woman’s eyes. The pilot blinked several times and her eyes suddenly focused.

  “What?” she said, but A’Alhakoth gestured her to silence.

  She didn’t think the pink snakes could hear, but feared that any emotional spike in the aether might turn eyes this way.

  “Aliens with powers like Daniel Lémieux’s took over your mind, back in Tavle Jocia ,” A’Alhakoth explained.

  “Where are we then?” Kamsichor blinked too rapidly.

  “Wherever it was you parked the Star Turtle,” A’Alhakoth said. “We’ve come through jump and are sitting close by. All of the aliens, too. Erin, Daniel, Iruoma, Kam, and Nkechi over on the same SkyCamel that I stowed away on earlier.”

  “What are your orders?” Kamsichor perked up and studied her now.

  Orders? I’m half your age, and a complete newcomer to the squadron who has only been here for six weeks!

  But she was also comitatus. The Commander had tried to explain to a naïve A’Alhakoth what that really meant, but it hadn’t hit home until now. If Kathra Omezi wasn’t here, then Spectre Twenty-Three was in charge.

  Frantically, she thought through everything Erin or one of the others had taught her about the Mbaysey and WinterStar.

  And what Father had taught her about hunting. She needed to be a predator now, just as Erin and Daniel had become her prey.

  “Passive scans only,” A’Alhakoth ordered this older veteran in as firm a voice as a youngster like her could. “Confirm where we are, what status the ship is in, and prepare for a jump away if we need to chase the Turtle down.”

  Kamsichor nodded and began pressing buttons and typing commands.

  Just like that.

  That was what comitatus meant.

  “One other thought,” A’Alhakoth said. “Unlock the guns, in case we need to destroy the SkyCamel when it returns.”

  Forty-Five

  When she got loose from this, Erin was going to kill every one of those snakes. Skin the corpses and eat them, intelligent or otherwise. She would wear their fur as a jacket and make a career of hunting down any species that looked remotely like them and wiping it out as well, just in case.

  Maybe she would ask Daniel for the coordinates to their planet of origin, and she’d try to convince Kathra to let her bomb it into a radioactive wasteland. Kathra probably wouldn’t put up too much of a fuss after she heard the whole story.

  They had worried about what Daniel might do. They should have known better. She’d been inside the chef’s mind enough to understand.

  These fuckers were going to be chicken fingers when she was done with them. The comitatus would feast on their flesh and then their souls, because if Erin understood the memories that had flown back and forth like water around her, the gem Daniel wore came from the oldest grandpapa snake ever, and all the rest of these pikers together barely had enough power combined to hold her, the women, and Daniel.

  What could she and Kathra do, if they had access to such gems as she was happy to cut out of corpses?

  Erin was going to kill all of them and then find out.

  The salaud in her mind had made her fly over to the Turtle. After a messy battle with Daniel, he had opened the landing fin and she had put the ship down as close to the inner hatch as she could without getting fancy.

  Everything was closed up now and the SkyCamel shut down. One by one, the snakes forced them out onto the deck, and five of them slithered along in a circle around Daniel, with the last one working overtime to keep the four of them in line.

  Quiet didn’t mean quiescent, you son of a bitch.

  They approached the airlock and entered the vast space Daniel liked to joke about holding musical concerts in, one of these days. Then into the hangar where Urid-Varg had kept all the old shuttles and ships he had stolen, minus the four that Kathra had sold to that Anglo at Tavle Jocia.

  The Star Turtle was a huge beast of a ship, in three major decks that all had vaulted ceilings. The conqueror himself had tucked personal quarters forward near the head, in a section of the neck where it all pinched down and he lived like a damned mendicant monk, raw stone walls, thin sleeping pad, and not much more.

  To get there, everybody had to traverse a couple of brag halls filled with trophies, and not just the shuttles inside the bay, but that stupid hall of skulls where previous victims had been stored, stripped of all flesh and preserved.

  Talk about sick and morbid. It wasn’t even like the salaud ever had company to be impressed by such things. No, this was just a male and his typical dick-measuring competitions with everyone else. As if a dick was the measure of a male.

  It was, however, a pretty good reason so few of them were kept around. After all, Kathra and the tribe only needed the product of the balls, and not the delivery mechanism.

  Erin
tried to pay attention to the skulls as they walked through the place, but didn’t remember anything like a giant snake. Only skulls that were close enough to human in shape and sensory apparatus, horns or not. Maybe he had never ridden the snakes, and only kept the people who had the privilege of wearing that ugly lime suit.

  Let me roll my eyes at your stupid ghost, Urid-Varg.

  None of the snakes seemed all that interested in the skulls, except to buzz angrily around her head where she could taste the conversation, but not actually hear the words. Like maybe they didn’t like that old shit any more than the rest of them did, but Erin had the feeling that they weren’t content in knowing that the salaud was roasting in hell now.

  Seemed from the flavor of things that Daniel was on the list to go with him. If that was the case, they probably should have killed him as soon as they hit the system, because eventually someone would get tired. Or stop paying close enough attention.

  Something.

  Erin couldn’t do anything, but waited like a big, black cat, poised up in a tree as she listened to something coming down the trail.

  There was going to be a pounce, just as soon as she was free.

  Forty-Six

  Daniel fought, but there was nothing he could do now to break through the ice to where the ishtan were protected from his rage. He had surprised them the once, but they understood how he had done it, perhaps, and could thwart him.

  Step by step, they walked him to the bridge of the Star Turtle. He could taste the awe in their voices at the vessel that Urid-Varg had stolen somewhere. The ishtan had nothing at all like it, having been a largely planet-bound species, even at their height, unlike the humans who explored every which way given any chance.

  But he was their enemy. And they were his now.

  He could hear his impending doom, but they had to first account for the Turtle, and Daniel had not stolen the right memories from the creatures to understand how they planned to do that.